Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
-
Hi
I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors.
The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages.
I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this.
The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening.
Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error?
Alex
-
Hi Keri
No, never resolved. Thanks for the suggestion!
Regards
Alex
-
Hi Alex,
Were you able to get this resolved? If you still have this problem, you might want to drop an email to help at seomoz dot org and have the help team look at it to see if they can figure it out. Thanks!
Keri
-
That's the other odd thing - I'm not getting any errors for duplicate page content, just for duplicate page titles.
-
Hmm, I can't say I'm sure why that is, Alex. It might have something to do with the SEOmoz crawl that I'm not aware of. It sounds like my blog site is set up much the same way as yours, but I do not have duplicate content errors showing up for this reason in either SEOmoz or GMT.
-
Hi Jeffrey
I have Yoast SEO set up to do the same, from when I first installed it last year. The /page/X code is also showing that the pages are noindex, follow.
The odd things here are 1) Google Webmaster Tools is not picking this up as an error, only SEOMoz crawl, 2) the error only shows since 1 Feb.
-
It seems what's happening here is that the error is related to posts that are no longer on the front page of your site. When you click to go to see "Previous posts" or something like that, that's when you're going to mysite.com/page/2, mysite.com/page/3, etc.
I have the Yoast SEO plugin set to "noindex, follow" these pages, and I do not get the problem showing up in my campaigns. I believe this is one of the options on the "Indexing" tab. I think it may be the "Subpages of archives and taxonomies" option that should be checked.
The easiest way to figure out is to check this option and then immediate check the page source code of "mysite.com/page/2" to see if it's being indexed or not. If the "nonindex, follow" tag exists, you should be set and this warning will probably disappear on your next crawl.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Local SEO - ranking the same page for multiple locations
Hi everyone, I am aware that issue of local SEO has been approached numerous times, but the situation that I'm dealing with is slightly different, so I'd love to receive your expert advice. I'm running the website of a property management company which services multiple locations (www.homevault.com). From our local offices in the city center, we also service neighboring towns and communities ( ex: we have an office in Charlotte NC, from which we service Charlotte plus a dozen other towns nearby). We wanted to avoid creating dozens of extra local service pages, particularly since our offers are identical per metropolitan area and we're talking of 20-30 additional local pages for each area. Instead, we decided to create local service pages only for the main locations. Needless to say, we're now ranking for the main locations, but we're missing on all searches for property management in neighboring towns (we're doing good on searches such as 'charlotte property management', but we're practically invisible for 'davidson property management', although we're searvicing that area as well). What we've done so far to try and fix the situation: 1. The current location pages do include descriptions of areas that we serve. 2. We've included 1-2 keywords for the sattelite locations in the main location pages, but we're nowhere near the optimization needed to rank for local searches in neighboring towns (ie, some main local service pages rank on pages 2-4 for sattelite towns, so not good enough). 3. We've included the searviced areas in our local GMBs, directories, social media profiles etc. None of these solutions appear to work great. Should I go ahead and create the classic local pages for each and every town and optimize them on those particular keywords, even if the offer is practically the same, and the number of pages risks going out of control? Any other better ideas? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HomeVaultPM0 -
Kind of duplicate categories and custom taxonomy. Necessary, but bad for SEO?
Hello Everyone! I'm new here! My husband and I are working on creating a website: https://sacwellness.com .The site is an online therapist directory for the the Sacramento California area. Our problem is this: In wordpress our category system is being used for blog posts. Our theme is using a custom taxonomy system to categorize different therapist specialties, therapeutic approaches, etc. We've found ourselves in a position where our custom taxonomy and categories are near duplicates. for example we have the blog categories: ADHD counseling, Anxiety therapy, and Career counseling our corresponding custom taxonomy/therapist categories are: ADHD, Anxiety, and....(oops) career counseling. My understanding is that google doesn't see a difference between identically named categories and custom taxonomies and will so choose one to rank and disregard the other, effectively leaving you competing against yourself. is this true in a case like this? Can google maybe understand the difference because of the custom taxonomy and/or URL paths? if this is a problem is it ok to have near duplicates....like ADHD vs. ADHD counseling. This has been our solution so far....but now we're questioning it....derp x_x. I thought about tagging the categories with no index, but I think the archive pages would be useful for people. Essentially we have 2 sets of archives for each keyword. One is for blog posts, and one is for therapists who work with that particular issue along with the 6 most recent blog posts in that category.....because we are putting the 6 most recent blog posts at the bottom of the therapist pages I feel like it wouldn't be as terrible of a loss if we had to noindex the category pages. ....what do you think? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
Company Name in Home Page Title? If and Where?
My guess is you want to do the {title} | {company name} format as I would suspect Google gives slightly more weight to the words at the beginning of the title? (This is assuming your company name isn't a generic word or you are specifically trying to rank your home page for your company name when it isn't ranking well already) But what about cases where you have like 5 or 6 keywords that are really important and used in the title gives you like 50 characters and your company name pushed it up to like 65 increasing the chance Google will use some other source to list the name of your home page in the search results? Obviously one can experiment, but wondering what the general consensus is - long keyword title, or longer title with company name? The company name can be included in the meta description and the domain name of the url displayed also gives the indication to the company. But maybe the algo "respects" long itles that have company name more than ones without as then it looks more like a keyword stuffing title? So many factors to consider. Yes - on page SEO isn't just about the title, but for this thread I'm just talking home page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids9641 -
Uppercase/Lowercase Reading As Duplicate Permalinks
I cannot figure out if this is an actual SEO issue or just a crawl reader error. I use Screaming Frog to crawl my site and use their SEO features. When I look at page titles and duplicates it shows all our pages twice... some with 1 letter capitalized and the other not. I don't REALLY have duplicate permalinks do I? I also noticed when I use some open site explorers and paste in both permalinks the specs will show for the permalink that's all lowercase but it won't find anything for the "duplicate" permalink that is capitalized. Below I included a few screenshots. Thank you Moz Fam! Q6866xZNUfpF cxXacVajCBGb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Page Title shown in SERPS not the same as
Hi all, I'm trying to get a homepage to rank for a certain term, but the page keeps showing up in the SERPS with the "Brand Name: Keyword" when I have written it as "Keyword - Brand Name" in the <title>tag. I can't even see "Brand Name" Keyword" in the code of the page so I don't know where Google is pulling this from? </p> <p>I have <meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir"/> on the page.</p> <p>I'm running Yoast and have removed the Brand from the Site Name and the Page Title for the homepage is "Keyword - Brand Name" in WordPress. I've changed the meta description so I can see the page has been crawled and re-indexed as the new meta description is showing in the SERPs</p> <p>Any idea, where Google is pulling this Page Title from and how I can get it changed to read the actual <title> tag? Or is there something I need to change in WordPress?</p> <p>Thank you!</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Duplicate Titles caused by multiple variations of same URL
Hi. Can you please advise how I can overcome this issue. Moz.com crawle is indicating I have 100's of Duplicate Title tag errors. However this is caused because many URL's have been indexed multiple times in Google. For example. www.abc.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adhunna
www.abc.com/?b=123 www.abc.com/ www.abc.com/?b=654 www.abc.com/?b=875 www.abc.com/index.html What can I do to stop this issue being reported as duplictae Titles, as well as content? I was thinking maybe I can use Robots.txt to block various query string parameters. I'm Open to ideas and examples.0